Google pinpoints bugs that send texts to wrong people

Google has acknowledged a pair of Android bugs that end up sending texts to the wrong recipients, saying it plans to deploy fixes for each.

On Thursday, in a post to the Android support forums, the company said that user complaints over misdirected texts stem from not one but two bugs. The complaints date back to at least June of last year, but the reports were only recently bumped up to "high priority" on the support forums, as more and more voices chimed in.

In some cases, Google says, users are tapping on one message and actually seeing another. The company says it doesn't believe the bug is affecting many users. "Double-checking the displayed message before hitting 'Send' will prevent any messages from being sent to the wrong recipients," the company said.

"We've found in testing this issue, it is more likely to occur if you tap on a message before the Messaging app is fully loaded, so we recommend waiting for all the elements to load before clicking on the message you want to display."

A second bug is actually delivering texts to the wrong recipient. "It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it's only occurring very rarely. Even so, we've now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy."

A Google spokesman acknowledged that the accuracy of the forum post, but had no additional info on when the fixes will actually be deployed.